It's the oldest tale in the book of high school cliches: Kids love Cool English Teacher for treating them like adults; administration hates Cool English Teacher for same reason; and then somewhere in there, there's a carrot in the butt.
Attention Americans, it's almost time to travel to your local movie theater to take in Nothing But the Truth, the ironically-titled Hollywood dramatization of the Judy Miller story! Miller, the former NYT correspondent (now with Fox!) who went to jail unnecessarily to protect Scooter Libby's right to plant fake stories with her concerning nonexistent Iraqi WMDs, is reportedly pleased with the film because it captures the "moral ambiguity" of her situation. It did so by casting Kate Beckinsale as (the much older) Miller, then "dramatizing" the story in order to make her a heroic, martyred "devoted mother of a seven-year-old" who "faces starker physical and personal consequences in jail." So, just how Judith Miller sees herself! Click through to watch two clips, exclusively featuring people who are far too attractive to be journalists:
Len Downie was executive editor of the Washington Post for years and years and years. Now he is the Vice President At Large. We don't know what that means except that it maybe gave him time to finish his novel, The Rules of the Game, which is a story of political intrigue, of fucking course. Also of fucking course: there is a newspaper editor in it! Uh oh! Time to name the thinly veiled real-life Post figures involved! The problem is there is like one easy-to-identify thinly veiled real person, and it's former Post editor Ben Bradlee, and the Bradlee character is a big brave hero, which is how everyone already publicly idolizes him. Actually it looks like all the journalists involved are big heroic hero types!
Like all single guys on the subway, men in the publishing industry like to devise, or at least imagine they've devised, strategies for attracting cute women, and for maybe even making these lady strangers do the hard, traditionally-male work of striking up a conversation. Unlike other men, publishing types have access to advance galleys of hot books, and they hope this will give them an edge with New York's many literary babes. The Observer's bookish young Leon Neyfakh made an ernest — eager, even — attempt to prove this hypothesis true, in a story with the hopefully-worded subhead, "Carrying Bolano's 2666 Is Like Driving an Open-Top Porsche." And he found plenty of literary men to agree with that thesis. But the women? Different story.
Ann Leary, wife of Rescue Me star and Libertarian tobacco-tax oppositionist Denis Leary, has written a novel, entitled Outtakes From a Marriage, in which the author has followed the age-old writer's maxim of writing about what one knows; in this case, what Ann knows is that her husband is entirely too preoccupied with the gravity-defying physical attributes of his BFF and frequent co-star, Elizabeth Hurley:
"Hillary looks like a bull dyke in a pantsuit, but at least she seems serious. McCain looks like Mr. Magoo. Obama looks like a fucking lemur, a little rodent-like creature, a marsupial or something, I don't know. Jesus, I have no idea of what's going on in the world anymore. Where's Ronald Reagan, now that I really need him?" [Nj.com]
All through college I loved writing short stories. But because I am a cad, when I found out how unprofitable the medium was I switched to blogging and TV scripts. Turns out there's still one way to market a short story: Pack it with references. Not thought-out T.S. Eliot ones, but marginal-pop-culture ones. Your story doesn't have to be good if it's about Vampire Weekend, the Tipping Point and Twitter.
An update on the Boston Globe's "19-0" book (written prior to the Super Bowl) about the New England Patriots' fictional unbeaten season: the paper's spokesman tells us officially today that there will be no reworking, rewriting, or revising of the project, as it "was put aside after the Superbowl victory by the Giants." That's 128 pages of wasted writing by Globe staffers, and one less book on the shelves for Triumph (ha) Publishing. But hey, if you want something along the same lines, you can always search for the Amazon tags that customers put on the book's page before it was taken down:
On this week's "Gossip Girl," the world's richest poor kid Dan Humphrey totally got a story published in the New Yorker! Whatever, we bet it was the Fiction issue, they'll let ANYONE in there! Later Serena gave him a nice present (a watch, so he'll be punctual meeting editors!) but he's such a fuckwad with class hang-ups that he can't accept it. But now we've "obtained" an excerpt of "his story" and we understand all.
Cory Doctorow turned a few Google-operated spy cameras his way when he wrote a fictionalized account of a dystopian future where the search engine stumbled and fell down the slippery slope into evil. We're sure "Scroogled," which appeared in the September issue of Radar, wasn't supposed to launch an entire genre of Google fiction. But it has. Someone has gone and written an account of a world where Google scans and indexes the human body — everybody's human body — for public search. (Photo by Jason Upton)
The latest issue of Radar, the on-again, off-again pop-culture ragazine, has a short story by Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow. "Scroogled" imagines a world where Google has slid all the way down the slippery slope into full-on evilness. The scary thing? In his speeches and blog posts, Doctorow veers toward irrational, paranoid rhetoric that's easily dismissed. But in his fiction, a darkly dystopian future where Google and the Department of Homeland Security have all but merged, where Google's Wi-Fi hotspots feature webcams that track your every move, doesn't just seem likely — it seems inevitable.
